By Tim Sanders

I am looking at one of my favorite photos. The photo is reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting "Christina’s World," depicting a crippled girl crawling across a field toward a farmhouse. Of course there are a few minor differences. For one thing, it is a photo, not a painting, and there is no farmhouse. And the crippled girl in the field is a healthy, middle-aged woman.

And I don’t believe there is a woodchuck in the Wyeth painting, either.

There is a woodchuck in the photo, though. The shot was taken in the Fall of 1963. My mom is sitting there in that field, wearing a pink print dress, peering down at my pet woodchuck who is standing beside her with what looks like the remains of a peanut butter sandwich in his front paws. The woodchuck looks very ... well, alert. Mom looks alert too, as though she is expecting Woody to make a sudden move in her direction. My mom was always alert.

Mom was always alert because I was a good son. Being an only child, I realized, early on, that the responsibility of keeping my parents entertained rested solely upon my slim shoulders. Children with brothers and sisters could divide the work among their siblings, but I didn’t have that luxury. I entertained Mom, mostly, because Dad didn’t respond to my entertainment nearly as well as Mom did.

Sometimes I would entertain Mom with delightful accident simulations. Once, for example, when I was helping Dad run some planks through his table saw in the garage, I had an inspiration. Poor Mom was missing all the fun. I told Dad I had to go to the bathroom and went into the house, looking for ketchup. I found some, applied a generous portion to the knuckle of my right index finger, and quietly went back outside. Then I re-entered the house, slamming the door two or three times and making a great deal of commotion. I howled and carried on, and of course Mom came running. It was all very effective, and she appreciated it, too ... later, when she’d had time to think about it.

When I was eleven or twelve, I found something I knew she’d admire at the local 10-cent store. Granted, this cost almost a whole dollar, but I wasn’t above spending considerable sums of money on Mom when the occasion warranted it. It may have been for Mother’s Day, or perhaps it was only for her birthday–I don’t remember. I would have spent the money for her even if there were no holiday at all. That’s the kind of son I was. What I found for her was something I’d never seen in our little 10-cent store before. I was astounded by it, and knew immediately that it would do Mom a world of good. It was a piece of genuine rubber vomit in an attractive plastic container. It was a work of art, with what appeared to be large chunks of corned beef hash, intermingled with several other things which I didn’t recognize, but which certainly looked authentic. In those days the rubber vomit industry was in its infancy, and the American buying public was still unfamiliar with it. For that reason, and also because I sprinkled a few drops of very realistic water on the linoleum near it, I was able to give Mom and her friend Barbara Wolf an impressive kitchen demonstration of the product. My sound effects were excellent, if I do say so myself. It cheered Mom up so much that after I’d bent down and retrieved it, she had to sit down at the table for awhile. She shook her head several times and sighed. She did that a lot; it was her way of expressing her delight at having such a thoughtful child.

When all else failed, I knew I could lift Mom’s spirits by strengthening her bond with the animal kingdom. We always had dogs and cats, and parakeets. Everybody had dogs, cats, and parakeets. But I knew this wasn’t enough for Mom. So I spent much of my early childhood collecting frogs, wild birds, squirrels, and other non-typical pets. I like to think that I was responsible for her getting that new automatic washer when I commandeered her old wringer washer tub to put my turtles in. Of course she may have already had the new washer; my memory is fuzzy on the exact time sequence.

Mom was deathly afraid of snakes, despite the fact that the only poisonous snake indigenous to Michigan was the tiny pigmy rattler, which is very reclusive, and spends at least six months out of the year vacationing in Florida. Now true, she never really warmed up to snakes, but I always knew that when she was feeling down, I could liven things up a great deal by tossing a garter snake in her general vicinity. It was truly wonderful the therapeutic effect a little snake had on her. One minute she could be sitting in a lawn chair, all wan and listless, and the next minute she’d be hopping around the yard like a monkey on a hot rock, all flushed with joy and excitement.

Dad did his part by bringing home a wide variety of wild animals, many of which he found on our lakefront property in northern Michigan. He found Woody up there, and brought him home especially for Mom. Initially Mom was not enthusiastic about him, due to his energetic nature and his two large front teeth. Of course I refer to Woody, not Dad. At any rate, the job of taming Woody fell to me. Since Woody was still a cub, or a pup, or whatever a baby woodchuck is called, taming him wasn’t all that difficult. He’d behave himself fairly well as long as he was rewarded with a peanut butter sandwich.

At first, Mom was quite understanding about having Woody as a house pet, but eventually he grew more inquisitive, and learned to explore saltine boxes and cookie jars and sock drawers, and she became disenchanted with the living arrangements. The final straw was probably when he crawled out from his resting place beneath the sofa and introduced himself to her ladies’ Bible study class. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it later. Apparently the ladies didn’t find a large rodent sniffing their feet spiritually edifying. To his credit, Woody turned a rather staid bunch of Baptists into a crowd of shouting, dancing, hooraying Pentecostals in no time. Shortly thereafter he was consigned to the lumber pile behind the garage.

We returned Woody to the northern woods that Fall, shortly after the photo was taken. Mom personally left a large jar of peanut butter beside a tree for him. Mom passed away in 1997, at the age of 88. I would encourage those of you who still have your moms with you to put forth that little extra effort to entertain them whenever you can.

I don’t have any spare woodchucks, but I do have a whole backyard full of very melodic tree frogs. If you can catch them, you’re welcome to them. I’m sure just a dozen of them harmonizing at night from a cigar box outside her bedroom window will entertain your mom for hours.